The Afghan Debate: It’s About Seeing an Exit Ramp

My latest Capital Journal looks at the debate about an Afghan buildup, which isn’t really about the buildup at all:

Policy arguments in Washington sometimes take on an otherworldly feel — and so it is with the public wrangling over Afghanistan policy.

Outside the walls of the Obama administration, the argument has been almost entirely about numbers: How many additional troops should be sent to Afghanistan? Should it be 10,000, 20,000 or 40,000? But inside the Obama administration, say those who actually have been involved, the debate has been much less about troop levels than commonly imagined. Instead, it has much more to do with ensuring that the American troop buildup, whatever its size, isn’t open-ended.

The key for President Barack Obama, these people say, is having a plan that ensures the American presence is a prelude to, rather than a substitute for, Afghanistan taking over the security job itself. The goal is for American troops to reverse the rise of Taliban strength in the short term, buying time for Afghan President Hamid Karzai to build up security and police forces that can take over while American forces phase out.

The internal discussion, in short, is less about the size of the entrance ramp than the location of the exit ramp.

Seeing the debate this way helps decode what seem to be the riddles in the Obama administration’s long pause for a policy review before deciding what steps to take next. President Obama, who has a plateful of other security issues to worry about as well, ordered a rethink because he feared the military plan for a buildup, whatever its other virtues, seemed open-ended.